Murtaugh doesn’t appear to have a website or blog, but displays her work in her Flickr galleries and is a regular contributor to fingerpainted.it, a blog devoted to digital painting on touchscreen devices.

Her topics range from portraits and still life to classic cars, matchbooks to florals. You can see her design background in the playful patterns with which she occasionally fills her backgrounds, as well as her design-oriented layouts.

What I find particularly appealing about her digital painting technique is her use of stylized texture, particularly when she uses textural elements in the role of brush strokes in defining forms.

There is an interview with Murtaugh on Photoshop Cafe that includes a step through demo. She also has a portrait tutorial using Sketchbook Pro on the AliasDesign site. She is a participant in thefingerpainters live digital painting demos.

[Via Telegraph]

The iPad, for those who have been living in a cave in Tierra del Fuego until this morning, is Apple’s new touch-screen device, so Kassan is painting with his finger, a pretty blunt instrument compared to a brush, pencil or stylus.

Kassan is painting in Brushes, a very capable digital painting app for the iPhone and iPad that allows for most of the basic tools of digital painting, including, of course, the ability to zoom in on the work.

Though it doesn’t allow for variations in pressure, a factor most of us who do digital drawing and painting have come to rely on, it does allow for changes in brush size and opacity, as you can see in the video.

(For another mention of the Brushes iPhone app, see my post on the New Yorker covers of Jorge Colombo.)

Most of us associate digital painting with work from the imagination, particularly given its popularity in concept art and science fiction and fantasy illustration, but a number of people use it to sketch or paint from life.

I’ve used a laptop, Painter software and a tablet and stylus to sketch and paint from the model, but it’s a bit of an awkward proposition. The lack of pressure sensitivity seems a fair trade-off for the easy portability and simplicity of the iPad (though you would want to make sure it was well-secured to your easel – grin).

Unlike the use of similar applications for the iPhone and Nintendo DS, the iPad is large enough to do more than small sketches. Kassan takes the painting pretty close to the state of a finished portrait.

Kassan has updated his website since I last wrote about him, including new work, a blog, and more videos.

In particular he has released a new three-hour instructional DVD, Drawing Closer to Life (images above), that follows him through a day in the studio, documentary style, as he develops a fully realized charcoal drawing (using the same model as in the iPad painting, if I’m not mistaken). There is a trailer for the video here.

[Via Daring Fireball]

His site has little or no biographical information, but has a number of his paintings arranged into genres. I found the work most interesting in the Illustrations section, which includes a variety of subjects including digital still life, and the Sketches section, which includes both briefly noted and more complete digital paintings, as well as some pieces in traditional medial like pastel and gouache.

Despite the lack of other information, he includes the titles of the works and notes the medium, and you can find more detailed comments for individual works on his space at CGSociety, where you will also find some of his pieces reproduced in higher resolution.

Korpi has an effective approach to controlled color and atmospheric perspective that gives his work, even those pieces that are more quickly suggested, a feeling of place and mood.

He has two process videos on YouTube, and has generously made his Photoshop brushes available for download from his Sketches page.

There is a brief interview with Korpi on Dark Wolf’s Fantasy Reviews, in which he expresses a particular admiration for 19th Century Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt..

As a caricaturist, Seiler often pushes his exaggerated portraits to extremes, to the point where they have a fun-house mirror feeling. He can then turn around and deliver a straightforward portrait, though he obviously enjoys the freedom that caricature allows.

His web site has sections devoted to entertainment and political figures, but don’t miss the sketches, in which displays a nice quality of line and hatching in the process of building up his monochromatic tones.

If I’m not mistaken, he works both digitally in Photoshop and in traditional media, using strongly modeled rendering to give his exaggerated faces a solid three dimensional feel.

Seiler also maintains a blog, in which he discusses work in progress, often with preliminary images and process sequences.

He has recently done his first character design for feature film, working on the Bandersnatch for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

Seiler is also an instructor with the Schoolism online school, along with Bobby Chiu and Ryan Wood.

Jason Seiler is the son of painter Larry Seiler, who I profiled yesterday.

In addition to his work in feature films, he often does design work for theme park rides and attractions.

Since my previous post, Pugh has redesigned his web site and added considerable material. You’ll find links to various galleries, including those exploring his interest in concept vehicles, and his fascinating “Liquid Vehicles” ideas (image above, top).

Pugh is a digital painter, and of particular interest to me were his pieces in the section labeled “Luminair”, a series of digital paintings from life (image above, bottom).

Digital painting is most commonly associated with paintings of the imaginary and fantastic, making it a common choice of media for concept art, but a number of artists are using it to paint from life (see my post on sparth construct). It’s a practice I sometimes enjoy myself, and find particularly fascinating in that it allows effects and colors unavailable in traditional media.

Luminair is the title of Pugh’s instructional book on the subject. There are other books either about, or including Pugh’s work in the “Store” section.

Desmarchelier maintains two blogs, Ushusia, which showcases his professional work, and harmattan, which is devoted to his personal projects, paintings and sketches.

He doesn’t include much biographical information on either, but you can see his professional film credits on the IMDB.

His concept art pieces, in pencil, watercolor, gouache and acrylic as well as digitally painted, are evocative, atmospheric and wonderfully textural, with a marvelous sense of place, season and time of day. His professional blog also includes sketches and the final piece for his contribution to the Totoro Forest Project (image above, top right, see my post on the Totoro Forest Project.)

Thumbing back through his blog posts takes you not only through several films, but through numerous locations that feel like a kind of travel adventure.

In his personal blog, the travel and places are real, and beautifully expressed; particularly in his directly observed but poetically rendered Moleskine sketchbook watercolors (image above, bottom).

You will also find figure studies, and paintings in acrylic and oil, as well as digital sketches in Painter and Photoshop, of subjects and places both real and imagined.

Gaser is a concept artist and art director for the film industry, though his previous work includes art for gaming companies. He has worked for companies like Electronic Arts and Sega Studios, and is now with Lucasfilm Animation.

His credits include projects like Demonstone: Forgotten Realms, Eragon, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and a new project called Blue Mars.

Since my previous article, Gaser has completely redone and expanded his web site, and has been maintaining a blog.

Gaser works digitally, painting his images in Photoshop, but the term I keep wanting to apply to his approach is “painterly”; though not in the sense of working in a manner that emulates traditional brush strokes, (as is possible in digital painting); Gaser paints in a way that is fundamentally digital, with strokes of color (often translucent) that are quite unlike traditional brushstrokes in many ways. I use the word “painterly” in the sense that the strokes of color are visible components of the painting. They impart texture and surface variation that contribute to the character of the image in a way analogous to paint strokes on canvas.

Gaser’s loose, but highly accurate application of color, and his wonderfully developed sense of color and value relationships, give his concept paintings, which are basically meant as a guide for filmmakers and game designers in composing the final animated images, a degree of visual interest that makes them stand on their own.

He has a nice balance of quickly noted passages, often in the form of atmospheric backgrounds, with just the right touches of detail, harder edges and sharp contrasts. It gives his images a feeling of dimensionality and compositional strength that I find particularly appealing.

In addition to selections of professional work, his is new web site includes sections of personal work, plein air painting, sketches, doodles and sculpture. Be sure to note that most of the galleries have multiple pages, accessed by numbered links at bottom right.

The Projects section promises that work from his most recent projects, Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Blue Mars will be added soon. I’m looking forward to that, but in the meantime, you can find some work from the Blue Mars project (image above, middle) on his blog.

Also on the blog, you will find mention of another recent project, an as yet unpublished book called In the Between, illustrated by Gaser and written by his mother, Sandy Gaser.

I tend to be involved in many things — web site design, web comics, Flash animation, cartooning, sketching and painting, among others.

I also have a long running fascination with dinosaurs and paleontological art. Recently, I had the opportunity to combine several of those skill sets and interests; and, along with a two friends of mine, programmer Leon Stankowski and artist/sound designer Bruce Gulick, created an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

If you ever wanted to put a tyrannosaurus head on a pachycephalosaurus body and add a stegosaurus tail — there’s an app for that!   It’s called DinoMixer.

DinoMixer is an amusement, in which kids and dinosaur art fans of all ages can mix and match dinosaur heads, bodies and tails to make crazy mixed-up dinosaurs, or un-mix them to match up the real dinosaurs.

I designed the app and did the illustration for it, which proved to be an interesting process.

Any form of illustration has its intended method of final display, from paperback book cover to CD jewel-box to computer monitor to console game screen. The iPhone is its own display paradigm.

If you haven’t seen one in person, the screen is very nice, it’s 480×320 pixels displayed in a relatively small area, so the the actual pixels-per-inch resolution is sharper than most computer displays (160ppi vs 103ppi or less for monitors) and the color is excellent; so even though the screen is small, the image is detailed and sharp. It’s a nice platform to do art for.

I had to do a little digging to find out the preferred image format. Though the iPhone will display a variety of image files, PNG is the native image file-type for the device. PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an underrated and terrific image format that allows both a wide color gamut of millions of colors and a full channel of alpha transparency.

Beyond those basics, though, I had given myself a challenge simply in the design of my particular app. To make the dinosaur parts match up, I had to divide the screen proportions into a grid, one that would accommodate the disparate body sizes and shapes of the various animals, and allow them to meet up at critical junctures where the illusion of joining them together could be accomplished. In addition, I wanted the dinosaurs to be relatively large on the screen, and use the small area to best advantage.

Fortunately, I’ve had this idea in one form or another percolating in my brain pan for several years (originally intended as a web feature, in dHTML or Flash), so the grid was a matter of adaptation to the iPhone screen proportions and refinement. But it was still quite a challenge to draw the animals so that they fit the grid, matched against one another and still retained a degree of scientific accuracy (there is no one quicker to notice discrepancies than a 10-year old dinosaur fan).

Once the dinosaurs were penciled to fit within the grid, I inked them, and in saying “penciled” or “inked”, I’m speaking of the digital equivalents, using a Wacom tablet and Corel Painter. I then applied digitally painted color and texture using Painter and Photoshop, in much the same method as I have used for the 15 years I’ve been doing my Argon Zark! digital web comic.

The use of ink lines filled with color wasn’t just a choice from my comfort with the technique, but vital, I realized, to producing the sense of unity necessary to make the dinosaur “mixes” work — the outlines connect precisely at their juncture points and form a whole.

I also took pains to blend the colors to an extent. While I wanted the colors of the dinosaurs to vary, to provide eye-pleasing variety, I also wanted some relationship between them. Though it’s difficult to see in the reduced resolution images, I found that working multiple colors into each dominant color, a technique often used by painters to produce overall harmony, was useful in giving the different colored dinos a bit of additional visual “glue”. Each of the dominant colors had accents and highlights of several of the other dominant colors within them.

In addition, I had to design a background that would showcase the animals and also connect them to the ground with a shadow, one that would meet the feet of all of the different shaped dinosaurs and serve as a universal shadow for all of them.

Lastly, I was not just creating illustrations that mixed and matched with one another, I was creating an application, and interface, with room for branding and functional controls, and the images had to work within that.

The final images, in particular the dinosaur heads, bodies and tails, had to be saved out as set-sized PNG files with transparent backgrounds, that would line up precisely with one another and allow the background to be seen behind them.

I created the original art at a much higher resolution than the target screen (3000 x 2000 pixels), both to give myself lots of leeway in creating detailed art, and to allow for repurposing the images (perhaps for T-shirts or other uses). I do the same with my web comic, create the original art at many times its intended display size.

10 dinosaurs (divided into 30 parts), a background, splash screen, nav bar and application icon later, I’m happy to say the resulting app works well, and has been getting good reviews. The seemingly simple premise took a lot of work (I conservatively estimate 200+ hours just on my part), but part of that was uptake on learning how to design and publish an iPhone app.

You can see the DinoMixer web site here, which includes screen shots as well as a short video, and those who use iTunes can see the DinoMixer app page in the iTunes App Store (link opens in iTunes).

I just submitted a new upgrade version of DinoMixer (v1.1) to the App Store yesterday, with features that include an additional dinosaur, multiple backgrounds and a dinosaur name box that pops up when you match a dinosaur correctly. If all goes well, it should make its way through the App Store approval process and be released in about a week.

Like many iPhone and iPod Touch apps, DinoMixer will be contine be upgraded with free revisions that add features and functionality. In my case, I’ll be drawing and adding new dinosaurs and backgrounds (as well as other features) for weeks to come. I can also update or revise the existing art whenever I want to invest the time and effort. It’s an illustration project with no set end or limit, something that makes it particularly appealing.

The app lets you record the painting process and play it back, and the New Yorker article linked above includes a time laps video of his process.

I say “fingerpainted” because unlike other small mobile computing platforms, the iPhone and iPod touch is a touch-screen interface, meant to be used without a stylus, so your finger becomes the “brush”. This seems a little ungainly compared to stylus based small screen painting applicaitons, but the results indicate that you can do some interesting work with it.

Colombo did his sketch in about an hour while standing outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

On Colombo’s web site you will find some of his iPhone sketches, along with other done in pencil and colored digitally. He is also offering prints of some of the iPhone work.

In addition, there is a section of video and press coverage of his New Yorker iPhone sketch cover.

[Suggestion courtesy of Jack Harris]

That being said, it’s still a collection of useful Photoshop digital painting techniques of potential interest to many concept artists, illustrators and comics artists, with a variety of styles and approaches, from anime and traditional comics to more realistic and fully rendered images.

Most are brief, but they cover various stages of sketching and rendering, discuss brushes, layer compositing, brush modes and other aspects of digital rendering.

(Image above, left to right:
David Munoz Velazquez, John Kearney, Melanie Delon (see my post about Melanie Delon)
Jim Zubkavich, Marta Dahlig, Shilin Huang
Artgerm, Artgerm, Yu Cheng Hong)